[Hashtags.org](http://hashtags.org/) popped up on my radar roughly a week ago, I’d say. I mentioned [hashtags](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/02/twitter-hashtags-a-quickie/) once already here. They’re a “user-generated” system for implementing tags into Twitter. (User-generated, here, does not mean the same as in the ugly “user-generated content (UCG)” everybody is talking about these days, but points to the fact that [hashtags were initiated by users](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/), not by the Twitter-makers — just like the @convention.)

So, what does hashtags.org do? Basically, it makes those hashtags visible. In September, Twitter introduced [tracking](http://blog.twitter.com/2007/09/tracking-twitter.html), which I realise now I haven’t mentioned here yet. Tracking allows you to “subscribe” to keywords. I personally chose to track “stephtara” and “@stephtara” so that any @replies would arrive directly on my phone as texts. I had the bad idea to track “fowa” during [the Future of Web Apps conference](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/10/05/my-notes-of-fowa-autumn-2007/). By break time I had 300 text messages in my inbox. Oopsie!

Hashtags.org allows you to view tweets labeled with a hashtag on a web page. Look at [#leweb3](http://hashtags.org/tag/leweb3/) for example, [#twitter](http://hashtags.org/tag/twitter/), or [#wordpress](http://hashtags.org/tag/wordpress/).

A few remarks:

– it’s not very populated yet, because you need to [follow @hashtags](http://twitter.com/hashtags) for them to track your tags; as of writing, only 132 people are — so start following!
– I’m getting 500 internal server errors when I try to look at a tag that doesn’t exist ([#lausanne](http://hashtags.org/tag/lausanne/), as of writing)
– once “everybody” starts using hashtags, it will be very useful to be able to narrow down a collection of tagged tweets to “my followees only”; imagine I’m at LeWeb3, and everybody is twittering about it: I’m not interested in getting the thousands of tweets, just those from the people I’m following
– for a long time, I’ve been a proponent of stickemtogether multi-word tags; recently, I’ve revised my ideas about them and come to realise that multi-word tags really need spaces in them, for better indexing; at the moment, you need to use “+” instead of spaces, like “#san+francisco” (unfortunately these don’t get indexed correctly, [another 500 error](http://hashtags.org/tag/san%2Bfrancisco/)); [Stowe suggests opening and closing hash](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/12/hashtagsorg.html) as an alternative, which is a bit hashy though it has its charm (“#san francisco#”).

7 thoughts on “Hashtags For My Followees [en]”

Well, we’ve fixed a lot of those problems and we’re working on the last one tonight (the 500 error and empty rss). The #hash+tag issues has been resolved. We’re working on getting some other features planned out and then start implementing them.

We’ve also migrated our server over to joyent so we’re nice and elastic now 🙂 Thanks for the write up and if you have any issues, ideas, questions, just email me or tweet #hashtags.